Bootstrapping a new architecture from bare metal is often a
problematic exercise in circular dependencies. I ran into a case of
this while building the coreutils.
Bootstrapping coreutils on a pristine HP-UX 11.23 ia64 machine
produces the following error:
./bootstrap: gnulib/gnulib-tool --import --no-changelog --aux-dir
.#bootmp/build-aux --doc-base .#bootmp/doc --lib libcoreutils --m4-base
.#bootmp/m4/ --source-base .#bootmp/lib/ --tests-base .#bootmp/tests
--local-dir gl --import ...
sort: illegal option -- g
Usage: sort [-AbcdfiMmnru] [-T Directory] [-tCharacter] [-y kilobytes] [-o
File]
[-k Keydefinition].. [[+Position1][-Position2]].. [-z recsz]
[File]..
Until GNU sort is available there is a failure. The native sort does
not support the -g option. Of course after the first build was
available then I had GNU sort for subsequent builds.
prereqs=
my_sed_traces='
s,#.*$,,
s,^dnl .*$,,
s, dnl .*$,,
/AC_PREREQ/ {
s,^.*AC_PREREQ([[ ]*\([^])]*\).*$,prereqs="$prereqs \1",p
}'
eval `sed -n -e "$my_sed_traces" < "$configure_ac"`
if test -n "$prereqs"; then
autoconf_minversion=`for version in $prereqs; do echo $version; done |
$SORT -g -u | tail -1`
fi
if test -z "$autoconf_minversion"; then
autoconf_minversion=$DEFAULT_AUTOCONF_MINVERSION
fi
case "$autoconf_minversion" in
1.* | 2.[0-4]* | 2.5[0-8]*)
func_fatal_error "minimum supported autoconf version is 2.59. Try adding
AC_PREREQ([$DEFAULT_AUTOCONF_MINVERSION]) to your configure.ac." ;;
esac
Since coreutils sets AC_PREREQ(2.61) in configure.ac the version to be
sorted is "2.61". The above seems just a little bit much in this case
but I don't understand the case it is trying to guard against. Isn't
having two AC_PREREQ's in a configure.ac an invalid case?
I can see that this is not fatal if 'sort -g' fails in that case, as
it did for me, because then autoconf_minversion ends up being empty
and is then set to a default value. But just the same I danced around
the problem manually to avoid it because I did not realize it until I
dug into it in more detail. If this bootstrapping issue could be
avoided it would be nice.
Bob
